Rome By the Book

We all know the story behind the foundation of Rome: in 753 B.C. (or thereabouts), two baby brothers, Romulus and Remus, the sons of Mars and the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, got separated from their parents, and were raised by a she-wolf who had lost her cubs (or, if you like, by a shepherd’s wife—but that’s no fun). When the boys grew up, they decided to found a city, but couldn’t settle on a name. To decide, Romulus stood on one hill and Remus stood on another, and they watched for an omen. Soon, Remus saw six vultures in the sky, but Romulus later saw twelve, so he won. Then he killed Remus, and became the first king of the Romans.

It’s a stirring myth, and it has served as inspiration for artists through the ages. Take, for instance, the Lupa Capitolina, a thirteenth-century (with some later bits) bronze that stands in Rome (pictured above). Or a recent performance installation at the New Museum, in which more than a hundred people gathered to build Rome from trash, and destroy it in the course of a day. Exhibit A, at right, Romulus’s Hut, detritus on cardboard (via Lit Drift).

The Times has the whole thing on video, but what caught my attention is an interview given by Liz Glynn, who conceived of the installation, to Archeology, on how she went about planning it. Apparently, it took her a full six months of research, and, I have to say, her reading list is impressive. It includes the long out-of-print “Etruscan and Roman Architecture,” by the Swedish archeologist and historian Axel Böethius and the British architectural historian J. B. Ward-Perkins, which was published in 1970, and later split into two volumes—one on Republican Rome, by Böethius, and one on Imperial Rome, by Ward-Perkins. She also consulted classic texts by George M. A. Hanfmann, the Harvard archeologist who ran campaigns in Sardis in the nineteen-fifties (all his books are out of print). She read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” along with Livy. But the sources she consulted most, she says, were topographical dictionaries.

The standard topography of Ancient Rome is by Samuel Ball Platner, who was the director of the British Institute in Rome in the beginning years of the twentieth century, and who contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome” was completed by a colleague after his death, and published in 1929. It’s available online, in the University of Chicago’s open electronic stacks, and is quite fun to search. For instance, the entry “Remoria” gives the location of the hill Remus supposedly stood on—”near the Tiber, five miles down stream from the Palatine.” This is where he wanted to build the future city. The entry above informs us that “certabant urben Romam Remoramve vocarent,” from which we may deduce: had Remus seen the greater number of vultures, Rome would have been called Remora.